Man and Woman in Christ: an Examination of the Roles of Med and Women in Iight of Scriptures and the Social Sciences
Clark, Stephen B.
MAN AND WOMAN IN CHRIST: AN EXAMINATION OF THE ROLES OF MEN AND WOMEN IN LIGHT OF SCRIPTURES AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Stephen B. Clark / Servant Books / $ 15.95 Philip F. Lawler V ampire prose....
...And the data from the social sciences are readily brushed aside to make fashionable ideologies more comfortable...
...Thus: Very little of Jesus' teaching in the gospels bears on the roles of men and women...
...Most of Western society, as Clark himself points out, will not accept the authority of the Bible...
...Nor even the strange attraction that young people today feel for ideas such as the Oriental yin-yang dichotomy, which present the female principle in its broadest outline form...
...So perhaps it is understandable that he misses the point of his own citation from Pope Pius XI: For ff the man is the head, the woman is the neart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love...
...In fact, his book is neatly divided into those chapters that discuss Scripture and those that discuss social scientific data...
...Ob-versely, it has devalued the qualities of intuition, poetry, warmth, quietude, fecundity, and contemplation...
...Merely to state the case is to recognize its inadequacy...
...To call for the subjugation of women without being provocative...
...He seems in fact innocent of any understanding of Marian devotion...
...As if that weren't enough, Clark has written this book (like his two previous works) for a miniscule audience: Christians living in a communal religious setting...
...And is the process irreversible...
...one cannot blink the many commands such as that found in I Peter (' 'Likewise you wives, be submissive to your husbands...
...Whatever the defects of the age, the Middle Ages did provide believing Christians with ample opportunity to integrate their faith into their daily lives...
...More to the point, Clark never comes to grips with the marriage of faith and reason that made medieval culture possible...
...Ultimately the enterprise is doomed to failure...
...Instead, he merely posits the rise of something he calls "technological society...
...And yet, despite itself, this book does yield some interesting thoughts, -if only by the powers of negative example...
...Rather than battle for their particular views, believers should retreat into their own enclaves...
...No Jerry Falwell here...
...Incredible as it may seem, Clark confines his discussion to the question of authority in male-female relations...
...But which came first, the chicken or the egg...
...female subordination...
...Paul never discusses the merits of slavery as an institution, Clark concludes: "In short, there is nothing of Christian significance in being a slave.'' Unfortunately, this unwillingness to mix faith and reason is not unique to Clark...
...Bolstered by some fairly solid evidence from the social sciences, he makes an altogether respectable case for his point...
...His recounting of the growth of Christian doctrine illustrates that preference...
...the rise of technological society or the confusion of sex roles...
...A proper feminism would strive to restore our appreciation for those traits, rather than imbue women with others...
...But is that a full explication of female (let alone male) responsibilities...
...Nothing could be further from the truth, of course...
...What is the distinctively female principle of conduct...
...Evidently he has not learned the brutal lessons of history...
...faith and reason are thoroughly divorced...
...Nor does he dwell on marriage at any length, not even insofar as marriage illustrates the full development of male and/or female characteristics...
...quite the contrary...
...Clark does half-recognize the problem...
...The net result has been the reigning popular assumption-only recently controverted by the Moral Majority and its cohort-the Christian faith is intellectually, psychologically, and politically irrelevant...
...Nor does he notice the deprecation of women that arose gradually alongside-his technological society...
...Now again, Clark is on solid ground in making this point...
...his argument glides over the Middle Ages, skating swiftest where the ice is thin...
...Contemporary feminism arises out of the premise that anything men can do, women can do just as well...
...Subordination is not a full-time job tor anyone...
...So it seems that we must leave aside trivia such as marriage, and move on to consider the important aspects of sex roles, such as...
...Like so many academic exercises, this book takes a fascinating topic into its embrace and sucks the life out of it...
...Walk into the nearest "Christian bookstore," and listen for the sappy background music...
...And why not...
...In many traits, after all, women clearly excel men...
...eye-glazing repetition, and footnotes- footnotes everywhere-within which the most interesting parts of the argument are safely squirreled away...
...Only passages on sex, marriage, and divorce are directly relevant...
...back to the catacombs, they had better also be prepared to face the lions-or their twentieth-century equivalent-again...
...Stephen Clark is a Roman Catholic, and yet, incredibly, he never mentions the example of Mary, Jesus' mother, as exemplar of the female principle...
...It seems these considerations are irrelevant to his thesis...
...If Christians intend to go Philip F. Lawler is Managing Editor of Policy Review...
...So he avoids any serious discussion of the culture in which Christian doctrine- including Christian doctrine about the roles of men and women-fits most comfortably...
...What does she do all day...
...What, then, remains...
...technological society emphasizes his function...
...And a proper reordering of sex roles- especially for Christians-would require both women and men to participate in that restoration...
...J n the dust jacket of this volume, a bevy of notable theologians and journalists praise the author for his exhaustive research into the Scriptural teachings on the subordination of women...
...To say she should be subordinate is hardly exhaustive of her responsibilities...
...Is there anything more than a knee-jerk response to feminist claims: an admonition for women to stay in their proper place...
...But the weakness of feminism in its current popular manifestation does not necessarily indicate that a woman's lot is a happy one...
...He has mastered the arts of scholarly somniloquy: interminable length (668 pp...
...Traditional society emphasized a man's status...
...However, these passages are more concerned with either sexual purity or the nature of marriage than with men's and women's roles...
...Such a principle did exist in the Middle Ages, but disappeared somewhere between Theresa of Avila and Gloria Steinem...
...If women's lives have any importance (and Christians view all lives as infinitely important), then they must answer to something more comprehensive than their husbands' wills...
...She rises early to make coffee for her husband, irons his shirts, cleans the house, and drives him to the train...
...Alas, yes...
...If Clark had examined the Thomistic synthesis in any detail, he might have limned the process by which that synthesis was overthrown, and modernity established...
...He sees that modern society has displaced the family with the workplace, compassion with cold reason, community with government, so that now, as he puts it, "The dynamic of family life is contrary to the dynamic of technological society...
...But Clark does not remark this disappearance...
...technological society does not care...
...Stephen Clark has shown the way...
...Sample the literary wares, and notice the suppressed premise that intellectual rigor (to say nothing of lively prose) is uncharitable...
...This reviewer, reading the book in Washington while the transition job-hunt swelled to fever pitch, did not recognize the world Clark describes...
...His research and documentation are formidable, and anyone who argues that Christianity and women's liberation are compatible will find this book a hard nut to crack...
...Enthusiasts spend much of their rhetoric shoring up that position with concessions, exceptions, explanations, asterisks-yes, and pure emotion...
...his approach is diametrically opposed to the activism prevalent on the New Right today...
...Is it possible to write a boring book about sexuality...
...Thus, for instance, since St...
...In a long book about sex roles, he manages never to mention sex...
...But will he convince anyone...
...Clark has shown how Christians should not respond to a hostile political milieu...
...Assuming that he has not left a list of commands to be fulfilled through the day, what does she do until suppertimc...
...Although he eschews fundamentalism, Clark is unwilling to draw any inference from his faith other than what he can derive from exegesis of Biblical passages...
...Now what...
...And at the same time, he has demonstrated how not to combat the women's liberation movement...
...Women cannot challenge men on men's home field...
...Nor is it enough, in a discussion of male and female roles, to fall back on general comments about the obligations of both sexes...
...Traditional society judged a person on who he was, or whom he knew...
...Two or three more books like this, and the subject will never die-it will live on in footnotes and dissertation proposals forever-but it will never really be alive...
...Imagine, if you will, the extreme example of a submissive wife: the b&te noire of feminist literature...
...Nor is housekeeping, thanks to the help of modern kitchen appliances...
...n non-Christian settings, Christians should accept the prevailing order and customs of the situation as much as possible," Clark argues...
...Period...
...Since the time of, say, Descartes, our civilization has paid increasing deference to logic, science, strength, ambition, abstraction, and aggressiveness...
...Therein lies the degradation of the feminine principle...
...For too long, Christians have played into the hands of their enemies, blurring the distinction between the worst excesses of smarmy piety and the highest reaches of Thomistic ethics...
...This despite the fact that (as Clark persuasively claims) modern society is inimical to Christian values...
...Clark, who has seen lions primarily in zoos, yearns for the halcyon days of early Christianity, before the conversion of the Emperor Constantine and the subsequent rise of the Holy Roman Empire...
...When a religious sect is confined to ghettoes within an adversary culture, tragedy ensues...
...All that praise is deserved...
...His delineation of that society is strictly one-dimensional...
...it is inevitable and it brooks no exceptions...
Vol. 14 • March 1981 • No. 3
